Top 160 Roger Zelazny Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.”

— Roger Zelazny

2. “That’s life: trust and you’re betrayed; don’t trust and you betray yourself.”

— Roger Zelazny

3. “Don’t wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.”

— Roger Zelazny

4. “While I had often said that I wanted to die in bed, what I really meant was that in my old age I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.”

— Roger Zelazny

5. “I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.”

— Roger Zelazny

6. “Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today.”

— Roger Zelazny

7. “Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty.”

— Roger Zelazny

8. “Good-bye and hello, as always.”

— Roger Zelazny

9. “Life is full of doors that don’t open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when you don’t want them to.”

— Roger Zelazny

10. “Then the fit hit the Shan.”

— Roger Zelazny

11. “No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.”

— Roger Zelazny

12. “I would never rest until I held vengeance and the throne within my hand, and good night sweet prince to anybody who stood between me and these things.”

— Roger Zelazny

13. “Of course it does not apply to me. I am the soul of honor, kindness, mercy and goodness. Trust me in all things.”

— Roger Zelazny

14. “His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.”

— Roger Zelazny

15. “Any man would be forsworn to gain a kingdom.”

— Roger Zelazny

16. “Love is a negative form of hatred.”

— Roger Zelazny

17. “I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.”

— Roger Zelazny

18. “All roads lead to Amber,” he said, as though it were an axiom.”

— Roger Zelazny

19. “The stars blazed like the love of God, cold and distant.”

— Roger Zelazny

20. “There’s no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.”

— Roger Zelazny

21. “I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.”

— Roger Zelazny

22. “When inspiration is silent reason tires quickly.”

— Roger Zelazny

23. “Thus did I bear Sir Lancelot de Lac to the Keep of Ganleon, whom I trusted like a brother. That is to say, not at all.”

— Roger Zelazny

24. “I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it’s only five minutes, and write three sentences.”

— Roger Zelazny

25. “Nobody steals books but your friends.”

— Roger Zelazny

26. “At the end of the season of sorrows comes the time of rejoicing. Spring, like a well-oiled clock, noiselessly indicates this time.”

— Roger Zelazny

27. “Go and copulate with yon purple lizard.”

— Roger Zelazny

28. “The day of battle dawned pink as the fresh-bitten thigh of a maiden.”

— Roger Zelazny

29. “I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don’t really like to know what I’m going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about.”

— Roger Zelazny

30. “I tried a very fancy attack I’d learned in France, which involved a beat, a feint in quarte, a feint in sixte, and a lunge veering off into an attack on his wrist. I nicked him, and the blood flowed.”

— Roger Zelazny

31. “I don’t know that I ever wanted greatness, on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something – or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it’s just an ego trip.”

— Roger Zelazny

32. “Sleep is perhaps the only among life’s great pleasures which need not be of short duration.”

— Roger Zelazny

33. “Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.”

— Roger Zelazny

34. “It is no shame to lose to me, mortal. Even among mythical creatures there are very few who can give a unicorn a good game.”

— Roger Zelazny

35. “To waste! You are unknown and unwanted, save by me. This, because you are fairly adept at the various embalming arts and you occasionally compose a clever epitaph.”

— Roger Zelazny

36. “Even the most heartening of philosophical vistas is no match for, say, a toothache, if it happens to be your own.”

— Roger Zelazny

37. “The absence of a monument can, in its own way, be something of a monument also.”

— Roger Zelazny

38. “The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.”

— Roger Zelazny

39. “If I get enough letters saying you never explained this or that, I suppose I’ll have to write another book.”

— Roger Zelazny

40. “The most difficult thing about Time, I have learned, is doing it.”

— Roger Zelazny

41. “The enemy of the moment is not as important as our own inner weakness. If this is not mended we are already defeated, though no foreign conqueror stands within our walls.”

— Roger Zelazny

42. “The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.”

— Roger Zelazny

43. “Good Morning. You’re in trouble.”

— Roger Zelazny

44. “I’m a lost soul. We do wail.”

— Roger Zelazny

45. “When you are about to die, a wombat is better than no company at all.”

— Roger Zelazny

46. “It is a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to try to kill you.”

— Roger Zelazny

47. “Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal – the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?”

— Roger Zelazny

48. “Wishes, wishes. Wish in one hand and do something else in the other, and squeeze them both and see which comes true.”

— Roger Zelazny

49. “We talked the moon out of heavens before either of us grew tired.”

— Roger Zelazny

50. “In the State of Denmark there was the odor of decay...”

— Roger Zelazny